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"The Workers Are Us." Alcide de Gasperi, looking happier than he had in years, cried with shaking voice: "We are not reactionaries. Every social reform which has been promised will be made." Of the Popular Front's 8,000.000 voters he said: "We are working to convert them." He also indicated that Italy would join the Western Union, but hoped that her peace treaty would first be softened.
The trouble was that reforms would not be easily carried out. Many De Gasperi supporters were dead against them. Giovanni Elken, Jewish secretary of the Christian Democratic Party in Bologna, explained: "Six million of our votes were cast by people who were just antiCommunists. I've even talked to a monarchist who believed that we will restore the monarchy. Yet it is our essential moral duty to bring about reforms that will raise wails from these six millions." Said Father "X," the Milan priest who organized Catholic partisans and kept machine guns in his study last winter (TIME, Dec. 29): "We must be with the workers. They are 'us.' The industrialists and landowners are 'they.' "
At Sesto Implese, on a Communist-run collective farm, a peasant said what millions of Italians felt: "We are now waiting to see what the government does with its chance. We know that we have to get up early in the morning to work. What we want is to be sure that there will be work to fill the day, furrows to plow, and bread to earn." The Communists' greatest fear was that the Christian Democrats would give that peasant what he wanted.
* In the national election pool, one Luigi Prato, of Valenza, a pessimistic member of the Popular Front, accurately guessed the number of seats the Popular Front would receive in the Chamber. By betting against his own side he won $100,000.